A look at any school text book of history or at the
university syllabi will tell us that Indian history is divided into three
phases, Ancient, Medieval and the Modern. There will indeed be some uncertainty
over where the ancient period ends and the medieval begins, but the three phase
periodisation is retained with a difference of a few centuries by one and all.
This fits in conveniently with the three year history courses whether in high
school or graduation.

This construction of the three phase history carry within
them deeper social messages and biases and also have a definite influence on
further historical researches. To begin with, there is an inherent assumption
that there is indeed an Indian history which can be divided into so many
phases. D.D. Kosambi in his critique of the Soviet Indologist D.A. Suleykin1
had this to say:

‘India is a not a mathematical point but a large country, a
subcontinent with the utmost diversity of natural environment, language,
historical development. Neither in the means of production not in the stages of
social development was there overall homogeneity in the oldest times. Centuries
must be allowed to pass before comparable stages of productive and social
relationships may be established between the Indus valley, Bengal, and Malabar.
Even then, important differences remain which makes periodisation for India as a
whole almost impossible, except with the broadest margins.’2

As readers can sense, what begins with an unequivocal
statement ends with a degree of ambiguity ‘with broadest margins’. The idea of
India itself is a product of long and incomplete history of integration of local
and regional societies into larger political and cultural formations. Historians
like Romila Thapar have occasionally dissected this to find a group of nuclear
regions separated from each other by long distances of forest and pastoral
tracts.3 These nuclear regions (the Ganga Valley,
Malwa, Raichur Doab, Andhra coastal plains, Saurashtra, Tamil coastal plains,
Assam Valley, Orissa Plains etc) were characterised by peasant agriculture,
settlement hierarchy, specialisation, a high degree of social stratification and
above all state formation. Over time these nuclear regions were integrated
politically and culturally. Hence despite often emerging as autonomous
socio-political units, they had similar political and social structures as well
as religious and cultural norms. These in turn sought to integrate the societies
around them into one social unit. Often what passes for Indian history is
essentially the history of these nuclear regions, especially the Ganges Valley.
The intervening vast spaces were inhabited by hunter-gatherer societies, tribal
societies living on a mix of hunting gathering, non-intensive cropping and
animal husbandry and also tribes or bands practicing specialised crafts. The
overwhelming presence of such societies had deep impact not only on
spatialisation of the subcontinent but also on the course of its history even if
read as the history of the nuclear regions. They simply cannot be treated as
peripheral to Indian History as many historians have sought to do. Nor can they
be taken as historyless people – societies without change. They too went through
processes of change and transformations but so far historians have not developed
methods to study them.

Regional differentiation has been noticed even in the
prehistoric period in the archeological records left by the mesolithic
societies.4 Regional entities and identities emerge
stronger in the ‘early medieval’ period with distinct languages. These were
necessarily focussed around the nuclear regions (which by now had grown in
number). Though these regional societies had strong interactions with each
other, they often followed distinct courses of development. Pan regional states
and religio-cultural traditions imposed a degree of uniformity in both social
institutions and political structures between the regions. Nevertheless beneath
these uniformities the regions developed distinct social formations – with their
own systems of production, labour forms, systems of subordination and control,
property forms and forms of surplus appropriation and distribution. What
characterised even these regional societies is the coexistence of multiple forms
and relations of production and a symbiotic relation between them.5

Somewhat intriguingly the nationalist-Marxist historical
tradition in India has shied away from studying this phenomenon and this task
has been left to non Marxist schools. Part of the reason lies in the perception
that affirmation of regional identities would lead to dissolution of the unity
of the Indian ‘nation’. This itself is a product of a reading of ‘Indian’
history which sees a chronic oscillation between ‘centrifugal and centripetal
forces’, between ‘strong’ centralised empires and ‘disunited and weak’ regional
kingdoms. While the former is supposed to have saved the ‘country’ from
‘foreign’ invasions the latter yielded to them. Now that national unity has been
achieved under the anti-imperialist nationalist movement it was not advisable to
endanger it by raking up regional ghosts from the past. This fear of regional
history is clearly articulated in the curriculum framework of the NCERT which
states, ‘introducing…local history at the school stage has the danger of
promoting parochialism and regional cultural chauvinism.’6

Thus the very idea of an Indian History seeks to project into
the past a modern political construction of India and is therefore forced to
give privileged treatment to the relatively short lived subcontinental empires
and integrating factors like Brahmanism. After all the idea of India is due to a
large measure to such imperial political formations and cultural aggrandisements.
Even conceding that the nationalist project of the late 19th and 20th centuries
may be a worthwhile and desirable one, it is both ahistorical and unjustifiable
to ignore the spatial diversity of historical developments.7
All said and done the fact remains that people of diverse nationalities and
proto nationalities and local societies came together to fight British
colonialism and this led to the formation of the post independence state of
India.

To project a primordial and single Indian-Hindu identity –
from time immemorial is precisely the project of the Hindutva right. One Hindu
identity based on the Vedic texts is seen as developing shades of diversity over
time and space as people moved into different habitats in the wide divinely
allocated locale stretching from the Himalayas to the seas (the Bharat Mata).
Thus regional diversities are seen as aberrations or dilution of essential
Indianness drawn from the Brahmanic sources. Eventually these have to be ironed
out into an uniform Indianness. In their view Indianness and India assume a
metaphysical identity standing above all individuals and regions and
communities. This clearly contradicts the modern notion of nation with the free
coming together of equal citizens to serve common goals. Rather it posits a
nation standing above and before the citizens, a notion essentially drawn from
tribal ideas of community minus its democratic content.

In order to foster a democratic understanding of India and
Indianness it is essential break free of the notion of an Indian history and
look at sub-continental diversities and give them the primacy they deserve.
Understandably this is easier said than done. Even Kosambi eventually
circumvented his own emphasis on regional diversity by talking of ‘vigorous and
dominant modes’.

The reader 'will have to remember that no single mode
prevailed uniformly over the whole country at any one time; so it is necessary
to select for treatment that particular mode which, at any period, was the most
vigorous, most likely to dominate production, and which inevitably spread over
the greater part of the country, no matter how many of the older forms survived
in outward appearance.'8

What was necessary 50 years ago when Kosambi wrote given the
state of historiography then, has remained the framework within which most
historians have worked till now. Looked at from this viewpoint, obviously it
would seem that caste societies, Brahmanism and imperial state formations were
the most vigorous and likely to dominate the rest of the country. But that does
not explain the ‘survival of the older forms’ even in ‘outward appearance’.

Today it is possible not only to start from the regions but
also to go into the individual societies that went to constitute the regions
themselves. It is time to stand ‘Indian History’ on its head to put the regions
and localities on the top.

We need to look into the question of regions not only to
examine the nature of diversities but also to explore spatialisation in the
history of the subcontinent. Spatial diversities are not only a legacy of the
past but created and transformed in every epoch through the interaction of
diverse societies and ecological niches. Urban spaces, rural spaces, the
frontier forest and pastoral spaces, spaces in which state societies and caste
societies flourished and spaces where tribal and other pre-peasant societies
existed, patriarchical-patrilineal spaces and matrilineal-matrilocal spaces...
these endless forms of spaces constantly interacted with each other to determine
the nature of each other. The more evolved and complex state societies which
have left us records of history have made their own constructions and
stereotypes of these diverse spaces and we should take care to see these biases
when we try to seek to construct a history of spaces in the subcontinent. We
will have opportunity to explore some of these problems further in the following
sections.

Here one must also comment the problem posed by delimiting
the area of research to what is ‘India’ today. It is well known that one cannot
understand the Kushana empire or the Sultanate or the Mughals without studying
central Asian histories or for that matter understanding south Indian history
without an excursus into South East Asian history or the North East without
going into East Asian or South East Asian histories.9
Yet they seldom form a part of the problematic of Indian university students.
This once again assists the Hindutva project of seeking civilisational
influences only within the geographic boundaries of the present day India.

II
The Threefold Division

The threefold division of Indian history into ancient,
medieval and modern periods owes much to post Renaissance European self
perception of its own history. The Renascent burghers were conscious of
effecting a break with their own feudal past. Both the Renascent humanists and
Enlightenment philosophers saw the feudal past as a period of darkness and
decline of civilisation. This they contrasted with the ‘ancient’ classical
Greco-Roman period which was to have registered a high watermark of civilisation.
The prehistoric and pre classical period (and non classical regions) were
largely ignored in this scheme. That is why even Marx while accepting the label
of ‘ancient’ for the classical ages introduced the notion of ‘Asiatic’ as a
preceding epoch.10 Of course Marx did not share the
notion of feudalism being a regression over the ancient period as he saw a
progress in the labour form from slavery to serfdom.

When the British colonial administrator-historians and
Utilitarian scholars studied Indian history they consciously or unconsciously
transferred the idea of tripartite division to Indian history. James Mill was
probably the first to use the tripartite division to Indian history in the early
19th century.11 Instead of the Ancient, Medieval
and Modern categories he used ‘Hindu, Muslim and British’ periods. Prior to Mill
the Romantic minded Orientalists like William Jones and later Max Muller
valorised the ‘Hindu period’ through a study of Sanskrit texts. This was
debunked by the Utilitarian scholars who spent much energy in negating any
civilisational contribution of a non European society. Nevertheless the idea of
a highly civilised ancient India survived. These civilisational achievements
were seen to be destroyed by the medieval barbarism of Muslim invaders much like
the achievements of Classical Europe were ‘destroyed’ by the twin invasions of
the barbarian tribes and Muslim Arabs. This was followed by the dark ages of the
‘Muslim rule’ till the English East India Co. initiated India into modernity.
Thus the tripartite division when applied to India had both the original
connotations of European historiography and also an added element of using
religion as markers of epochs. Under this twin influence was founded the
communal vision of Indian History, which postulated a positive Hindu ancient
period, a negative Muslim medieval period and a modern Christian British period.
Indian history could be neatly divided into three phases – the Hindu period
lasting till 1190 followed by the Muslim Period with the founding of the Delhi
Sultanate and ending with the Battle of Plassey (1760) which saw the beginning
of British rule. The religion of the rulers was used as a marker because it was
believed that Indian society especially the rural society was changeless and the
only change was at the level of the rulers. (We will return to this theme of
changelessness later.) There were disturbing factors like the extreme south
which never saw a stable Muslim rule, Rajasthan which was ruled for long by
Hindu rulers and Central and North East India which either had no rulers or did
not subscribe to Islam in the so called Muslim period. Nevertheless the
tripartite division was too attractive to be abandoned.

The communal historians and following them the run of the
mill pulp historians who purvey standard text books on Indian history in the
market have assiduously promoted the idea of civilisational collapse in the so
called Muslim Period. For example, one of the indicators of civilisational
levels was the ‘status of women’. It was supposed that women enjoyed a very high
status in the ancient period, with little or no sati, child marriage or
purdah. However with the coming in of the barbaric Muslims who habitually
carried away Hindu girls, it became necessary to burn widows, marry off girls at
an early age and keep them hidden away behind veils. Similarly with caste. Hindu
society had to harden itself in response to the Islamic challenge and hence
caste rules became rigid.12

This three phase division got entrenched in the school and
university education so much so that it continues to this day. Part of the
reason was that it neatly matched the three year school and undergraduate
courses in history. So the threefold division was retained with a little
shifting of the dates to give it a veneer of secularism. Thus instead of
commencing the medieval period with the establishment of Muslim rule in 1190,
the ‘cut off point’ was shifted to the death of Harsha around circa 650 CE.13
This interestingly was supposed to mark the end of large empires and the
beginning of feudalism.

We will take up the question of feudalism later on and
presently concern ourselves only with the threefold division. Besides nurturing
popular notions of history through the teaching of history in schools and
colleges it has also had implication for production of historical knowledge. It
is generally presumed that one understands ancient history with the help of
archeology, epigraphy and Sanskrit texts; medieval period is studied mainly with
the help of Persian chronicles and documents and finally the modern period is
understood by a study of English documents preserved in British and Indian
archives. Thus even in the so called progressive university departments a
segment called ‘early medieval history’ has been created and that has remained
within the jurisdiction of the ancient history sections. This essentially covers
the period prior to the establishment of the Sultanate. The ostensible reason
for this is that the sources for this period continue to be in Sanskrit and
epigraphs constitute the bulk of primary sources. This is of course highly
questionable as we start getting large volumes of epigraphs in regional
languages and literature in non Sanskrit languages including Persian and Arabic
forms the bulk of our sources for this period. Using language as a demarcator
tends to promote a communal divide among researchers. Despite notable exceptions
the general trend has been that Hindu students take up ancient history for study
and Muslim students are encouraged to take up medieval period presumably because
they have easier access to Sanskrit or Persian.

As a result of such apartheid policies, methods of study have
also have got compartmentalised. Thus for generations historians have failed to
ask elementary questions which familiarity with different kinds of sources and
sources of different periods would have necessitated. For example Medievalists
have seldom looked at Navyanyaya texts which proclaim a paradigm shift in
Brahmanic philosophy; nor have they asked the question as to what happened to
the Brahmin land grantees who so predominate the historiography of the ‘early
medieval’ period. Modern historians with the notable exception of non Indian
scholars have treated the zamindars as creatures of the Permanent Settlement and
have seldom raised the question as to what happened to the zamindars who were so
crucial to the Mughal state system. The breaks in Indian social history are
perhaps not so sharp as they would seem from such compartmentalised studies –
they are more historiographical breaks than perhaps real.

Of course archeology is not even remotely considered a
possible source for medieval or modern history. A major exception of course is
the work on Vijayanagara which incidentally is virtually treated as a part of
the Ancient period because of its Hindu ruling elite.14
In another exception Iqtidar Alam Khan has used field survey of Mughal
structures to reconstruct the history of sarais and roads and bridges and
also indigo technologies. However the official department of archeology has
little to show for medieval archeology. In fact most departments dealing with
archeology in the universities are called ‘department of ancient history and
archeology’ as if archeology had relevance only to ancient history!

While it is increasingly becoming clear that such division of
Indian history is impeding historical research, departments have tenaciously
stuck to the older modes more out of concern for petty patronage purposes than
any lofty consideration. Today more than ever it has become imperative to break
the shackles the threefold division has imposed on the structure of our
university departments and consequently upon historical research and the
teaching of history at the popular level.

III
Change and Changelessness in Indian History

Periodisation is necessarily concerned with change,
qualitative change. A society’s history cannot be periodised if it did not
undergo qualitative changes. Thus even while it was possible to divide Indian
history on the basis of dynasties that ruled, it was difficult to talk in terms
of modes of production and social formations. The ambitious task Kosambi had
outlined for Indian historians – to present ‘in chronological order of
successive changes in the means and relations of production.’15
– still remains unfinished.

Colonial historiography and under its influence Karl Marx had
maintained that Asiatic societies were relatively unchanging and the changes in
political sphere were merely confined to the superstructure. ‘All the civil
wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid and
destructive as the successive action in Hindustan may appear, did not go deeper
than its surface’, and further, the village communities transformed ‘a
self developing social state into never-changing natural destiny’.16
Marx tried to integrate this into his overall theory of social history and
provide a materialist explanation for it. We can condense his argument thus:
Asiatic climates required artificial irrigation on a vast scale to sustain
agricultural production; this was not possible on a small scale and had to be
undertaken on a large scale as public enterprise; since private enterprise could
not provide conditions of production and this effectively limited the growth of
private property in land and hence stratification and class formation too
remained restricted; this also facilitated state control over agricultural
production; the state extracted the principal portion of the surplus as land
tax. While the state took care of irrigation and surplus extraction in the form
of tax, the society organised itself into village communities – which controlled
and operated land collectively and through the balutedar system (hereditary
division of labour and combination of industry and agriculture) took care of
all its craft needs. The absence of private property and stratification of the
civil society meant that there would be little dynamism to propel change. All
conquests and revolutions were over the surplus extracted by the state and all
peasant resistance was confined to protesting against excessive taxation and
were incapable of transforming the production or social relations.17
The state, though overpowering and oppressive did not intervene in the
functioning of the village communities which were left relatively autonomous.
This was in contrast to the post-renaissance absolutist states of Europe which
constantly enlarged the scope of state activities and intervention in the
affairs of the civil society. Since this social formation was the closest to
tribal communal formations and still retained many forms of communal life Marx
preferred to place it as one of the first forms of transition from primitive
commune to class-state societies.

As anti-colonial and communist movements took shape in China
and India, there was considerable debate over Marx’s positions. Much of the
debate took place in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and 1930s with some
participation from communists from India and China. The debate took place as a
part of the larger debate over the strategy of the Chinese revolution. The
question of allying with a Chinese bourgeoisie arose only if the Chinese society
was feudal; if it was seen as a country with Asiatic mode of production, then
one could not posit an organically developing capitalist class. We will not
digress here on this point and refer the readers to Sawer’s useful summary of
the debate.18

Even though Kosambi spearheaded the movement for documenting
historical change in India, a close reading of his work would indicate that he
too shared the paradigm of changelessness. He had viewed the ‘traditional self
sufficient village community’ with its unity of agriculture and industry as a
prescription for changelessness or as he would have put it – sluggishness.19
Following Marx he was of the opinion that change and cultural progress required
individuation and interaction – both of which were negated by the
self-sufficient village communities.20

It may be recalled that Kosambi had criticised the dropping
of the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ by Stalin and found the concept useful for
understanding Indian history even though he saw little merit in the hydraulic
state theory. He found the concept of Asiatic mode useful to explain what he
considered the minimal use of force in Indian history to maintain a class order
and surplus extraction.21 Indeed there is a degree
of vagueness in his use of the concept as he felt that the so called Asiatic
mode permeated ‘several stages’. He had also opposed the use of the stereotype
primitive communism – slavery – feudalism – capitalism schema for India by the
Soviet Indologist, D.A. Suleykin and S.A. Dange. He seems to have visualised the
process of change in India as – tribalism – state formation in Ganges Valley –
integration of the subcontinent by the empire, trade and missionary activity –
transition of tribes to peasant agriculture under their impact – alienation of
power and resources by the state (a process he termed as ‘feudalism from above’)
– emergence of self-sufficient village communities under local lordships (which
he termed ‘feudalism from below’22). The resilience
of these communities to change ensured their survival to the post Independence
era in which Kosambi revisited them and sought to construct their histories.23
Recently the editor of his works has pointed out that a tension existed in
Kosambi’s framework between a sense of stagnation and change. ‘It may appear
strange to find Kosambi here endorsing the notion of Asiatic Mode of Production,
which he so vehemently opposed in the slightly later Introduction but it was
Kosambi’s understanding of the power of ideology which was at the root of this
contradiction, perhaps in a sense an admission of his own difficulty to achieve
conceptual resolution between change and ‘negation of history’. In understanding
Kosambi’s historiography one cannot gloss over this contradiction; it is this
tension rather than facility of conviction that lies at the root of all radical
thinking.’24

The objective of this excursus is not to go into the
evolution of Kosambi’s thinking but to illustrate the point that the issue of
change in Indian history is fairly complex and simple reductionist approaches
may not be of great use here.

We will illustrate this point with yet another important
Marxist historian of Indian history, Irfan Habib. He has sought to present a
survey of the entire pre-colonial history of India in two major papers written
in 1965 and 198225 Habib believes that the
principal contours of peasant production had evolved by the Gupta period - it
meant a peasantry divided on caste lines and a great divide between the
peasantry and the dalit agricultural labour. Subsequent technological changes
did little to subvert peasant production and indeed reinforced it. This period
also saw the emergence of the village community controlled by influential
landholders, collectively controlling other peasants, the landless dalit
labourers and village artisans and acting as an intermediary between the tax
collecting state and the peasantry. This in effect lasted till the British
period despite significant changes in the manner in which the state or its
representatives appropriated agrarian surplus. ‘It can, therefore, hardly be
disputed that the caste structure of the village and its attending elements as
formed in ancient India continued to function without recognisable change till
the eighteenth century. Apparently then, there were no internal processes at
work to disturb the social structure of the village. But the surroundings in
which the structure stood, were altered in certain respects. It is this
alteration, in the nature of the ruling class and the pattern of distribution of
the surplus, which, by its effects on the conditions of the life of the
peasantry, provides the justification for demarcating the medieval from the
ancient.’26

We will have occasion elsewhere on to comment on Habib’s
notion of peasantry. It would suffice here to note that he too essentially
agrees with Kosambi that Indian society did not see any fundamental change for
nearly 1500 years till the onset of colonialism and attributes this to caste
based peasant production and village community.

A somewhat different viewpoint emerges from the study of B.D.
Chattopadhyaya, especially his comparative study of rural settlements and
societies in three regions in the early medieval period.27
The image of changeless and isolated village communities sustaining changes in
the composition and modes of surplus appropriation by the rulers is brought into
serious questioning. To summarise some of his findings in his own words:

‘rural settlements and, by implication, village
communities as isolated does not... take cognizance of settlement hierarchies...
Rural space did not consist of single units in a vacuum; nor did it extend to
horizontal infinity. There may have been different levels at which individual
units, with variations within them, could intersect. Viewing rural settlements
not simply as undifferentiated landmass would lead to acknowledging the
possibility of the existence of nodes even in rural space and of change.’

‘If we can leave aside such facile notions as villages in the
past existing as little republics or as settlement units the state merely drew
revenue from, then a major point that can be raised is: how does rural society
figure in the political processes in different phases of Indian history?... The
query itself implies that at different points of time in history, rural society
may have undergone different experiences and that these experiences were
generated by changes far wider than the attitude of a passive/active or
benevolent/despotic monarch.’

‘Early medieval documents do offer alternatives to the
somewhat simplistic picture of brahmana dominated rural society, at the most, of
a society polarised between the local lords... and an undifferentiated mass of
common residents. ...’

‘We do not consider that rural settlements in the janapada
stand at a distance, as separate entities, from the state, but are integral
components of the totality of the state structure. At the same time, there may
be reorientations of the relationship between the different components, for
example, the apex power represented by a ruling lineage and the rural
settlements. Reorientation, by and large, may be viewed as a historical process,
in which both the structure of the rural society at a regional and the structure
of the apex undergo change, the nature of change deriving from the nature of
their mutual relationship.’28

Chattopadhyaya’s village level study points to existence of
hierarchies in rural settlements and horizontal and vertical integration among
them; to organic linkages between rural society and the state structure and
finally to ceaseless change in the rural society with the change being induced
either by the external or supralocal forces or the local forces; to rise of new
social categories. This is in stark contrast with the notion of Marx cited above
and shared to a large extent by successive generations of historians. The
unaltering and isolated village community, the main culprit behind
changelessness thus melts away, leaving the question of change looming larger
than ever.

Questioning the utility of categories like Slave Society or
Feudal Society derived from European history in the Indian context also needs to
develop new notions and yardsticks of change. If living in Kalikatti, the
village in Karnataka had changed significantly between 890 and 1250, then how do
we understand and theorise about this change? Do we dismiss it as superficial or
reversible or do we reopen and reexamine our conceptual tools?

IV
The enduring presence of tribalism and the problem of periodisation

One of the first scholars to try to periodise Indian history
on a materialist basis, D.A. Suleykin, grasped the centrality of transition from
tribalism to class society in determining the nature of Indian history.

‘In this case a fact of cardinal importance is that in
ancient India, the primitive communist system was never liquidated completely,
as a result the strong survivals of this system became the main obstacle in the
way of the development of a more progressive, slave owning society.

The progress of transition from classless to class society
was far from being smooth and painless. No, this transition was accomplished
under conditions of a long and very sharp struggle...

Inevitably the consequence of this struggle was that the
survivals of the primitive communist system and communal ownership, in the long
run obstructed the development of private property of the means of production...

It is quite possible that the primitive democracy did not
want to give its positions and was so strong that it seemed impossible to get
rid of its opposition, and therefore, it has been preserved in the village
communes. There is no doubt that in the beginning the primitive democracy waged
a fierce struggle for its existence ....’29

By all accounts, the single most important transformation
most Indian societies seem to have undergone in pre-British times is from
tribalism to peasant agriculture based states. The imprint of tribalism is
everywhere, on the caste system, on the village community, on the religion,
agricultural practices, and even on state institutions. Almost every single
important state or kingdom seems to have emerged either directly from a tribal
past or in direct collision or interaction with it. The origin myths are a
testimony to this. Some states openly wore the tribal imprint on their sleeves;
some camouflaged it or sought to hide it under the carpet. Even the mighty
Mughal state, the most powerful and successful of imperial formations of the
subcontinent, had to contend with its tribal past as enshrined in the traditions
of Chengiz or Timur.30 It struggled hard to deify
the emperor to overcome tribal institutions which vested power in the kin group
rather than in the person of the emperor. So much so that the very term ‘Mughal’
was an anathema to the imperial Mughals as it carried connotations of a lack of
high culture. The Mughals never called themselves ‘Mughal’ just as the Gond
Kings of Mandla did not call themselves ‘Gond’.31
It was the common people who preserved those names for us.

The most celebrated epic of the subcontinent, the
Mahabharata, preserves the searing memory of the breakdown of a kin based social
order and the emergence of an impersonal state.32
The Magadhan and subsequently the Mauryan empires have been constructed by
historiography as centralised bureaucratic states and we see little trace of
tribalism in them. But all subsequent states betray such influences and one
needs to revisit the early historic sources to understand the Mauryan state
better.

The very nature of most states of the subcontinent was a
direct inheritance from tribalism. The tribal custom of appropriation of surplus
for common good and redistribution by the chief provided the essential basis for
taxation. The state and the king justified themselves through elaborate rituals
ostensibly performed for common good.

These states, unlike the classical formulation of state as an
instrument of the dominant class, were themselves the ruling classes and were
the principal appropriators of surplus. In other words they emerged even before
class differentiation matured within the society and by siphoning off surplus
prevented such classes from maturing.

The constant overbearing presence of tribalism and the
movement of societies to and away from tribalism needs to be better understood
and theorised. So far we have seen innumerable examples of movement from
tribalism to caste based state societies. Yet we cannot rule out the possibility
of the reverse process – of the transformation of caste societies into tribal
societies. Historians and anthropologists have made timid suggestions in this
direction. Habib has recently suggested that Afghan tribalism may be a
post-Sultanate phenomenon.33 Archana Prasad has
suggested that the slash and burn cultivation by Gond or Baiga tribals may be a
consequence of having been edged out by Maratha and other settlers.34
Then there is also the presence of a substratum of myths of tribal dominance in
even the most developed parts of the Gangetic plains, the site of the early
historic transition.

Historically the two way movements of non tribal groups
moving into tribal areas and subjugating or evicting the tribals as well as
movement of tribals into developed state society areas are fairly well attested.
Most regional kingdoms are said to have been founded by segments of main royal
lineages splitting off and conquering some tribal pocket and eventually arriving
at an understanding with the original inhabitants and building a state
apparatus. We have equally large examples of old established state societies
collapsing under pressure of invading tribals.

In other words the stresses and strains of the state
societies were absorbed by the tribal societies as segments of the former
fissioned out and subjugated pockets of the latter. This can be illustrated by
origin myths of hundreds of ruling lineages.35
Likewise state societies could never stabilise and evolve due to the constant
incursions of tribal peoples and institutions. This was one of the reasons for
constructions by Indian state societies of tribals as fierce and aggressive
people to be held at bay and control. Asoka the great liberal and tolerant
emperor that he was goes out of his way in the 13th rock edict to warn the
tribal people that ‘the emperor has power even in his remorse’. We know of the
impact of great tribal movements of the post Gupta and post Harsha period ending
the era of large empires with some degree of central control. Likewise we can
see the end of the Cola political formation due the incursion and absorption of
marginal tribals from the uplands of the Tamil country.

Such complex processes of reversion to tribalism, transition
to state formation, fissioning off within state societies and incursions into
tribal lands, tribal incursions into state societies, tended to arrest or subdue
the organic evolution of state societies through handling their contradictions.

A question that persists is – why did tribalism survive for
so long in such a large measure in the subcontinent while it was effectively
liquidated in Europe even while feudalism was being established in the first
millennium of the CE. There are two possible directions in which we can look for
answers to this question. Firstly, a very high availability of land as compared
to sparse population, a scenario which finally ended in the late 19th or early
20th century. Secondly, some unidentified weakness of agrarian technology which
gave an edge to tribal ways of life mixing shifting agriculture, hunting,
pastoralism and gathering and also trading in precious forest produce.36
We need to study the evolution of tribalism and its adaptation to such a mix in
livelihood. This is an area where further research would be well rewarded.

Periodisation becomes problematic if we are to recognise that
the transition from tribe to class state was never completed and there was a
constant oscillation between the two throughout history.

Summary

The question of the periodisation of Indian History is not
merely of academic importance, but has had great importance for the construction
of the identities of peoples in our times. As such it has deep political import.

By talking of a history of India, and ignoring the
process by which subcontinental identities were formed and the modern Indian
state was constituted we fall into the trap of RSS-BJP’s primordial Indian-Hindu
nationalism. This also goes a long way to legitimise the oppression of
nationalities striving for autonomy and independence within the Indian
federation. Any people’s history of South Asia should not only seek to
reconstruct the process of creation of modern identities but also dwell upon the
vast regional and local diversities and trajectories of development.

The threefold division of Indian history into ‘ancient,
medieval and modern’ has little analytical value and instead carries a baggage
of meanings which glorify the ancient at the cost of the medieval and the
modern. This once again reinforces stereotypes that the RSS-BJP are trying to
promote. It is also detrimental to purposes of research which it pushes into
watertight compartments, each with its own distinct tools of analysis and
preferred source materials. If this framework survives despite its glaring
problems even in the ‘progressive’ history departments it is due to the need to
sustain patronage powers and networks assiduously cultivated in the 70s and 80s.

Studies undertaken within a Marxist framework have time and
again concluded that the social formation in India remained relatively
changeless and stable during the first and the second millennia of the common
era till colonialism broke this system. While the magisterial authority of such
studies cannot be questioned easily, it only means that we need to develop new
perceptions and yardsticks to understand change, which was taking place
ceaselessly nevertheless. This would require us to examine newer sources and
local histories and also refine the notion of modes of production and change
itself.

We also need to develop methods to understand the processes
that governed the evolution of tribalism and tribal institutions and their
interaction with state societies.

End Notes:

1 D.A. Suleykin, Basic Questions of the
Periodisation of Ancient Indian History, Calcutta, 1954. Originally
published in Russian from Moscow/Leningrad in 1949.

2 D.D. Kosambi, ‘On a Marxist Approach to
Indian Chronology’ in Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings (Ed.
B. Chattopadhyaya), New Delhi 2002, pp. 49-50 (originally published in 1951).

3 Romila Thapar, ‘Towards the Definition
of an Empire: The Mauryan State’ in Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts, New Delhi
2000, pp. 462-488 (originally published in 1987).

4 B. Subbarao, The Personality of India,
Baroda, 1958. For a more recent review of the matter, see Bridget and Raymond
Allchin, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan, New Delhi 1983
and later editions. Especially, their last chapter entitled ‘subcontinental
unity and regional diversity’.

5 For a non-Marxist work on the subject see,
Harald Tambs-Lyche, Power, Profit and Poetry. Traditional Society in
Kathiawar, Western India, New Delhi, 1997

7 A significant exception to this mainstream
history writing is Irfan Habib’s three volumes of ‘People’s History of India’.
These as yet cover only the prehistoric period and we need to see how he and his
colleagues treat the later periods. Irfan Habib, People’s History of India
(three volumes) New Delhi, 2001, 2002 & 2003. For a degree of sensitivity to
regional diversity also see Romila Thapar, Early India, New Delhi 2002.
At the school level the class 6 text book for history prepared by Delhi SCERT
may be seen as a step in this direction. Incidentally for the first time these
text books dispense with the boundaries of the present day India in maps
illustrating premodern history, which had been made mandatory by the Survey of
India.

8 D.D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the
Study of Indian History, Bombay 1975, p. 14.

10‘In broad outline, the Asiatic,
ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as
epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.’ Karl Marx,
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow, 1970, p. 21.
Engels built the basis of the concept of primitive communism as preceding the
ancient formations in his Origin of Family, Private Property and the State
(Moscow, 1950). The use of the term primitive communism however came with
Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. See History of the
CPSU (B) Short Course Moscow, 1951, pp. 194-5. Stalin effectively replaced
the notion of the Asiatic mode with primitive communism.

16 Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile (Ed.
D Fernbach), Penguin 1973, p. 302, 306. Contrary to popular belief, Marx himself
never used the term ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ and preferred to call it
Oriental social system or social order.

17 For a detailed discussion on the matter
see Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production,
The Hague, 1977, pp. 40-70. Sawer somewhat underplays the importance of
hereditary combination of agriculture and industry in the village community in
Marx’s scheme. See also E.J. Hobsbawm’s introduction to Marx, Pre-Capitalist
Economic Formations, London, 1964, p. 33.

21 See Kosambi, Combined Methods in
Indology and Other Essays, New Delhi 2002, pp. 58-9. Paper originally
published in 1954.

22 For a somewhat sterile debate on
applicability of the concept of feudalism to India see, T.J. Byres and Harbans
Mukhia, Feudalism and Non-European Societies, London 1985.

23 ‘Differences between villages were eroded
by a static mode of production, so that a village founded in AD 1500 looked
about the same after a century or two as one first settled over a thousand years
earlier.’ Kosambi, An Introduction, p. 259.

30 Cf. ‘the tribal character of Mongol
polity did not permit the rise of an absolutism comparable to Turkish monarchy.’
Iqtidar Alam Khan, The Political Biography of a Mughal Noble, New Delhi
1973, pp. x-xi.

32 Cf. ‘The intrinsic sorrow of the
battle of Kurukshetra is not merely at the death of kinsmen but also at the
dying of a society, a style, a political form.’ Romila Thapar, From
Lineage to State, New Delhi, 1984, pp. 140-1.

34 Archana Prasad, ‘Reinterpreting tribal
livelihood systems: Underdevelopment and the local political economy in central
India 1800-1940’ in B.B. Chaudhuri and Arun Bandopadhyay (Ed.), Tribes,
Forest and Social Formation in Indian History, New Delhi, 2004.

36 Kosambi repeatedly pointed out the paradox of the spread
of agriculture reducing commodity production and trade. He was of the opinion
that forest dwellers engaged in commodity exchange with traders from the settled
regions.